Animation Lock: Why don't you like it?

[Alhanelem]

Animation Lock do not ruin PVP in any way at all, See LoL, see HoN, see DOTA2 they have animation lock and they are still enjoyable, giving more challenge than any PvP games out there.

They are not enjoyable BECAUSE of animation lock, they're simply enjoyable whilst happening to have it.

The animation lock in those games is BARELY noticeable. It does not have a great impact on the gameplay. It doesn't disable your character for a couple seconds- on top of that, you can cancel animaitons on many actions- so they don't really even have animation lock on everything.

Animation lock NEVER has a positive impact. It can either not impact anything because the animations are too fast to be noticeble or you aren't completely locked down, or it can have a negative impact if it's any worse than that.

That was queuing a skill.

No. he's not talking about queuing actions. You could perform other actions while you were locked by an animation- just not MOVING AROUND. and in certain battles where you need to move around a lot, that is a major, major hinderance. Yes, you can work around it and yes you can still beat those contents. But that doesn't mean it's good game design- I can assure you of that, as someone who has some experience interacting with the industry.

B) Limit your movement in battle and have animation lock in place of the visual global cool down on your skill bar.

Why do people keep talking about animation lock and global cooldown as if you have to have one or the other of these things?

ANIMATION LOCK IS NOT INTENTIONALLY PLACED IN MOST GAMEs AS A GAME MECHANIC. It is there for visual quality purposes only. Some games that have an emphasis on realism will have an unobtrusive animation lock intended to keep the player's actions looking realisitc. However, there is NOTHING realistic about being frozen in place because someone cast a buff on you or you finished casting a spell 3 seconds ago.

There are many games that have neither animation lock or global cooldowns.

MMORPGS tend to have global cooldowns not because they limit actions, but for network performance reasons- by limiting most nonmovement actions to 1 per server 'tick', the server is able to handle a greater number of simultaneous players.

By the way, many here seem to be forgetting something:

I prefer Animation Lock for aesthetics in most cases, but I recall it being a problem for many in general.

The ORIGINAL POSTER of this thread was advocating animation lock on AESTHETIC grounds.

That I can understand and respect (whilst disagreeing, but still, I respect it). Personally, I don't feel animation lock compromises my immersion enough to be worth having to deal with.